


bury the sweet street slowly

by hitlikehammers



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Community: holmestice, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Reunion Sex, Reunions, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 04:43:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Sherlock supposes he shouldn’t be surprised, really. Just because they are everything, just because they’ve filled his heart—a ventricle, an atrium each—it doesn’t mean they aren’t idiots.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Love, in truth, does not a genius make.</i><br/> </p><p>Sherlock doesn’t know where he fits, after the Fall. John and Greg remind him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bury the sweet street slowly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heeroluva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heeroluva/gifts).



> For [heeroluva](http://heeroluva.livejournal.com/): a pinch-hit for the Winter 2013 [Holmestice Exchange](http://holmestice.livejournal.com/), which explains why I don't even know if it works, really, but I do hope this fits at least a _little_ of what you were looking for :)
> 
> Title credit to [Dylan Thomas](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-saint-about-to-fall/).

He supposes that they think he must have had it planned, had it sorted: that he must have known precisely, deduced within acceptable parameters of certainty how it would happen, what it would look like, the intervals between the knocking and the squeak of hinges and the exact pitch of the intake of breath from beyond. He supposes that they think he had more than blind hope—hope that churned in his stomach and made him feel faint, feel weak, feel alien to his own self as it ate, as it contradicted at every construct of identity he’d worn around his tender soul like armour and impervious fact; hope that consumed and tingled in his skin and spread through his vessels scented strong of the crescents of surgical soap beneath John’s fingernails; whispering against his neck like the graze of Greg’s beard—he supposed that they believe that he was patient, that he was collected and calm and that he never faltered, and the wanting and the aching and the sharp stabbing of guilt and loss had never felled him, had never threatened him at the end of a needle, or a cliffside, or the muzzle of a gun.

They think that he was silent on purpose when they answered the door. They think that he stood still against the blow to his jaw with intent. They think he knew exactly how this would happen, charted the course of how it all would come to its close—the chase, the trick, the growing thing in his chest that hates, that sneers, that taunts and promises nothing but ruin: they think that he’d planned to the letter how this all would finally end.

Sherlock supposes he shouldn’t be surprised, really. Just because they are everything, just because they’ve filled his heart—a ventricle, an atrium each—it doesn’t mean they aren’t idiots.

Love, in truth, does not a genius make.

__________________________________

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that when he jumped, not all of the snipers packed up without incident._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that the watcher on Greg had been wound tight, too young: an outlier, a prodigy, but untested, particularly in the midst of too many cops. So when he’d flinched, when he’d fucked up, the reality of trying to shoot a Detective Inspector in the middle of NSY came raining down with a vengeance and when Greg had put the fucker in lockup, he’d declared it a triumph._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that, when Greg finds out about Barts, about loss, about John on the ground and Sherlock in a bag, he vomits in the men’s toilets and shivers, slides down the wall as he shakes with the impossibility, the weight on his chest: the guilt of not being there, of not stopping it, of working for a system that did nothing but push this man he loved to the edge until he tumbled far and hard—the guilt of celebrating victory as Sherlock had bled on the pavement, as the soul slipped from him with the red from his veins._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that John felt guilty enough about Sherlock, felt shattered enough for watching it happen, watched it splinter and spill: John was already broken, undone, and the horror that brewed beneath the surface in him, the wrenching that slipped beneath his notice in the ether at the idea that he could have lost them both, could have lost _everything_ , is beyond his capacity to process, to contain._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that Greg resents John, for being there; for not stopping it._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that John resents Greg, for not being there; for not stopping it._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that for all that they try, in the after—for all that they intend to reach and hold and touch and create something that looks, that tastes, that feels like solace: for all that they fall asleep tangled and tear-stained and torn half to shreds, they wake at opposites, at odds._

_What Sherlock doesn't know is that, every night—every single night—ends with a space in between them._

_A Sherlock-shaped space in the centre, left bereft._

_Fitting, that._

__________________________________

He jumps the second time for the same reasons as the first, for the same feeling that spurred every fall he’s known worth noting, worth sparing deletion. 

This second time he plummets, though, in the flesh rather than anything less tangible—anything more true in his chest than his limbs—as he repeats the action, he ponders it, debates it, thinks about it even less than the first time, even less than at the start.

His pulse races, and his muscles burn. The man with the gun—the loose end Sherlock hadn’t known of, hadn’t even seen to snip at the root—the man with the gun stands on the precipice, twists blades through Sherlock’s body that neither can quite see: speaks soft, shrill of the way John and Greg had been stoic at his memorial, had moved on without incident, had returned to their careers and had thrived, Greg being considered for a promotion, John on at the surgery full-time, looking to move back to hospital work—at Bart’s, no less. 

The man with the gun tells Sherlock that they’re better off, that they’re happy, that they’ve settled into something natural and normal and capable of grasping a future that could hold, and it’s everything Sherlock has observed for himself, everything he knows that claws at the centre of his being every night he could spend between the men he loves and yet doesn’t, can’t: can’t enter the room that Greg and John share—John’s room, once, not Sherlock’s old space where they’d all built something glorious, impossible out from so many scraps; that slips into his veins and threatens to lodge in the curve of his aorta and halt gravity every time that Greg cannot meet his eyes, that John reaches toward Sherlock, gives him unthought reasons to yearn before he pauses, takes Greg’s hand in his own instead; the cold thing that whispers beneath every offer of forgiveness that there are some things beyond redemption, and some choices that cannot settle inside a context that makes any difference, that rights any wrong.

It’s every fear that Sherlock can’t swallow or stand, and while he knows that they are founded, grounded, set in stone and sealed within the hearts he broke in the drawing of inertia against the cold and vacant ground: even though he _knows_ , it chokes him.

It chokes him, and when the man with the gun sneers and promises to spare the men he cares for, the men who are better than him, better than he deserves, better rid of him than in his arms, held close—safer for his absence from their lives, or better yet, this mortal coil altogether; happier; joyous, even, if the stars are well aligned: when the man with the gun promises to let the men Sherlock keeps in his marrow and traces through the dendritic web inside his cerebral cortex just as surely as he painted them, tattooed them indelible against the fibres keeping time, precarious chordae tendineae that tremble, that play discordant against the way he strokes them, hesitant, making certain they’re still intact if only just, if so frayed and failing, so unkempt and unbolstered, bereft beneath his ribs.

When the man with the gun says he’ll spare his heart for the sacrifice of his body, it’s not a question. It’s not a debate. 

It turns sour in Sherlock’s throat, the finality, the suggestion of nothingness after so much grasping and giving and scrounging toward the dregs of infinitude, just the bare silhouette of what was, of what he’d had, they’d had, he’d _known_ : it’s bitter, and it’s hard for him to breathe, but there’s no question.

No debate.

Save that to trust is a foolish thing, near hope in its absurdity, in its capacity to blind. Save that trust is demanded and Sherlock cannot abide, because his heart resides beyond him, and he trust only where it lies, even if by rights he should think twice: Sherlock trusts only the grasp, the heat of his lovers, his partners, the men he has learned to live and die for, aiming toward better and landing upon worse.

 _They won’t be harmed, so long as you do what you were always meant to do and die_.

Sherlock shivers, his eyes narrow.

Trust.

Trust has built him a crystalline palace, and he’s watches it’s started to crumble with him still housed inside. It severs, it stings. It draws blood.

And Sherlock has lost so much, already, and for whatever time worth having that remains, his heart will belong beyond him, outside him, wanted or no.

Friends protect people. Love endures all things.

He runs at the man with the gun, and trusts momentum where he can trust little else. The shards of his palace fall; strike him through the chest, stark.

They tumble half-blind, whole-hearted toward the depths.

__________________________________

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that John works because Mrs. Hudson needs the rent, and he’s too damned proud to take the money Mycroft offers, reveals as rightfully his, rightfully his and Greg’s because Sherlock willed it to them, the bastard._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that John works full time to pay the rent because where Greg would leave in an instant, for the ghosts that claw on his back, John is hellbent on staying in 221B, because the ghosts are better than nothing at all._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that Greg is up for DCI because he rarely leaves the office, rarely does anything save comb through the cases Sherlock solved—solved by rights because he was a goddamned genius—so that he can prove not only that Sherlock was anything but a fraud, but more than that, more than that, the Met could not have solved those cases on their own. Not in time._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that Greg is up for DCI because in the moments when he’s weak—and he’s often weak these days, he’s often too tired to be anything but weak—he thinks of Sherlock, thinks what Sherlock would do, how he might look at something, how he might see it. Greg lets his joints creak for the sting of it as he crouches over crime scenes and tries to be the part of his heart that’s all shrivelled, now, all open flesh with salt in crevices: he tries to channel that talent, that god-given skill in those eyes, that mind, and sometimes he manages, and sometimes he closes a case no one else can and keeps other chests from feeling as raw as his own: sometimes._

_Always, though, it hurts._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that John’s hours make it easy for him to hide the fact that he goes to the cemetery. Every day. Stays there. Stands until his leg starts to bother him. Sits until the cold settles in too deep._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that Greg works long past dusk because there’s no one at home to sit with, to eat with, to be with._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that even when Greg and John are in a room together, even when it’s quiet, when it’s still, there’s no one._

_No one’s really there, anymore._

__________________________________

Wet. He’s very wet, when he surfaces, when he drags the unconscious form of the Man Whose Gun is Now At The Bottom of the Thames onto dry land and cuffs him to a nearby skip, waits until the sirens echo close before he runs: runs because there doesn’t seem as if there’s anything else left that he knows, runs because he gave up everything and traded it for running, running, and even when he thought it was over it hadn’t ended, his muscles 

He remembers, before, when it started, when they became _they_ , when they came together and it settled like gravity and drifting snow, rose like hot breath against the bitter cold.

And the truth is that, before the world changed entirely, before his chest had cracked in a way not entirely uncomfortable and most assuredly metaphorical, before something slick and hot and warm crept into the crack—the truth is, before John, Gregory Lestrade was the closest thing to _real_ that Sherlock knew. The truth is that it had been Lestrade’s hands that had found his struck-still heart beneath the ribs and thrust it into waking.

In more ways than one, in the end.

So when John came, when John became crucial, essential, a pivot point—Polaris; when Sherlock had learned to see the spark in his own chest mirrored bright in John’s eyes, he’d brimmed with an energy, a frantic polarity that buzzed in the marrow of him, magnetic, overbearing and far surpassing the limits of reason and the boundaries of his self. When John came, Sherlock reached after the pool, and John reached back, and Sherlock’s struck-still heart for the fear of it fell full into infinitude.

And yet, every case, every day they spent in the company of those other hands, that other soul: infinitude, for the common masses, is enough—more than.

But Greg’s eyes are also magnetic: possess poles of their own. 

So when the bullet grazes, and when the good DI falls with a cry, the struck-still heart in Sherlock’s chest finds a twin, finds a match—and Sherlock should have known, because John is _John_ , and the definition of _John_ is everything that Sherlock could ever require above breathing; the struck-still heart for fear once more finds reflection in John’s eyes, in the way John freezes and fails to breath as he watches, just a moment, before he dives and assess vital signs, tends wounds as Sherlock snaps, shoots the aggressor and doesn’t bother to watch as the man stops, hands to his chest as he crumbles, as he fades.

Sherlock feels the way his heart trips, sees it matched at John’s neck in a galloping swell, and _John_ means _Sherlock_ means _Greg_ means _all_.

Impossible. So very true.

So when they ease Greg up the stairs and onto the sofa to rest, to breathe, so careful, so still: when they all fall inward, stripped of defence, Sherlock doesn’t, cannot hesitate.

He kisses John with his hand on Greg’s chest. He kisses Greg with his fingers against John’s wrist.

They kiss each other, breathless, and Sherlock tastes all three of them on both sets of teeth, on the tips of both tongues and the world is warm, and Sherlock feels light.

In truth, it still confounds him: to think that the heart he’d doubted so long had been somehow vast enough to grasp and hold, to embrace two hearts in kind.

But then, he remembers after—after the force of gravity against all the bones in his body and the thinning of his blood and the aching in his chest; after heartbreak and the churning in his head, tumultuous and viewed through haze: he remembers after, remembers returning and waking in hospital after the chase, after dodging the bullet meant for his heart, both holders of that heart: leaping and pushing them far so that they’d walk away, so that it would not have been for nothing. 

He remembers after, Greg near the door and John at the foot of the bed: remembers silence, and the thick pall of fury and despair. He remembers John’s hand on his shoulder in passing, and the brush of Greg’s fingers handing him water in bed, passing him tea. He remembers distance. He remembers the illness in his stomach, in the cradle of his chest.

He remembers the after, as it exists inside the now—the way they seem to orbit one another, but never connect. The way he aches to touch, and yet feels it as a trespass, a violation: the attention of an interloper, unwanted, unloved.

The way he aches to _be_ touched, and yet it stings like a transgression, a mortal sin.

It hurts, but does not surprise him, to know how the empty space they’ve left in him gapes—stretched thin and worn, misshapen at the centre of him, billowing sick against the night air, the breaths that escape him slow, ephemeral.

He debates returning, wonders whether he’ll be wanted in 221B, whether his absence will have been noticed at all—he leaves, sometimes. It’s not uncommon.

He wonders if it’s worth it. Wonders if he’ll ever find his heart between those bodies, hot against those souls again. He wonders if he holds any part of either man, anymore—wonders if what he had of them, what he cherished: he wonders if it spilled in the blood, not his, on that day, in that fall.

He wonders.

He has nowhere else to go.

__________________________________

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that, when it started, when they started—at the outset, Greg met John at The Swan and Edgar for drinks and asked him, how._

_How does this work? What do they want? He’s not—_

_And John had looked at him, covered his hand without hesitating; told him: It works like breathing. Sometimes it hurts, but it never stops making you feel alive._

_And John had taken a long drink of his lager; told him: We want whatever you want. We want to...invite you. To want with us._

_And Greg, he’d swallowed hard, and he’d said it, because it needed to be said._

_But he loves you._

_Because John, he can believe it. He can fathom John’s mind and John’s capacity for caring, John’s attention and compassion: he can think of John holding them both close and wanting, _needing_ , unmeasured._

_Sherlock, though—_

_And John had smiled at him, small but so genuine, radiating possibility and what joy might really mean; told him: You’d be surprised, Greg, at how big that heart really is. All the space he hides inside._

_And funnily enough, that’s all he needs._

_They leave the pub together, that night._

__________________________________

Sherlock shouldn’t be surprised at how much the empty flat feels the same as a full one, these days, in the after; in the now.

He shouldn’t be surprised at how the whole of him sinks low, descends heavy to the pit of his stomach where it festers, roils acidic, at the truth that there is no one here to find him. To greet him. To find some modicum of joy in his return. There is no one, here.

No one.

He breathes, listens for the steady drip of dampness from his coat against the floor; the unsteady flutter of valves inside his chest.

“ _Christ_.”

Sherlock spins, turns jagged and untempered, all tetherless momentum and the dizzy spin of the thoughts in his head, the sentiment stuck sharp in his throat as he takes in Greg’s form, Greg’s face in the doorway: Greg’s fingers as they clasp the frame like a lifeline, the knuckles of the opposite hand gone white around the case of his phone.

“John,” Greg gasps, breathless down the mobile he’s holding as he stares, wide-eyed at Sherlock where he stands, suspended by fear and grief and a plasmic yearning to have and to grasp and to never release, never give way again. “He’s here, he’s at the flat.”

And Greg’s tossing the phone on the side table with a clatter before he crosses the distance between their chests in one, two, three brisk strides, before he takes Sherlock’s face in his hands and studies him, surveys the whole of him from head to foot, breath warm and fast against Sherlock’s cheek and the scent of him: all rainwater and clove in Sherlock’s throat.

“You,” Greg rasps, thumbs tracing Sherlock’s cheekbones, eyes far too bright as Sherlock barely thinks, barely dares to breathe in. “You’re—“

Sherlock feels lightheaded, the blood rushing through him at uncoordinated pressures, with a distinct lack of finesse.

“You’re a mess, Jesus,” Greg exhales against him, just a bit choked, and when his lips brush the corner of Sherlock’s mouth, Sherlock thinks that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t survive a second fall; maybe this is more than life and living.

Maybe this is whole; beyond: irrational.

Beautiful.

Improbable in the extreme.

“Get these clothes off, goddamnit, Sherlock,” and Greg’s pulling away, tugging at Sherlock’s wet jacket, wet shirt before he turns, goes to the stairs and calls back and he near-trips over his feet in the frantic climb: “You’ll catch your death.”

Sherlock blinks, can’t quite orient himself as he watches Greg disappear; can’t quite halt the frigid numbness in his limbs, in his bones at the robbing, there; the loss.

“Greg?” And it’s minutes, moments: Sherlock’s pulse stutters when he hears the voice—frantic, pitch trembling as John’s familiar gait surges wild up the stairs; as he tears into the flat and gapes at Sherlock, still standing, half stripped and shivering, and Sherlock knows that he’s more naked than his body is concerned, just then: Sherlock knows that his soul’s on display as the whole of him quivers, aches, regrets in the middle of the room: as John stares for a moment, for two, breathing heavy before he’s next to Sherlock, touching Sherlock, drawing Sherlock close against him, hands on Sherlock’s shoulder blades and forehead bowed beneath his collarbones, shaking, the both of them: shaking, and it’s not so cold, anymore, but gravity is cruel as it reorients, reasserts, and John’s weight leans solid against his body, tight against his beating heart.

“Oh, thank god,” John breathes, half-sobs into Sherlock’s bare chest, and Sherlock can’t recall that last time he felt safe like this, warm like this.

He can’t recall, as he fights the urge to wrap John in his own arms, in kind, lest he dismiss the illusion, this glittering impossibility. 

“Sherlock, you,” John lifts his head, and Sherlock feels strange lacking, wanting. “ _Fuck_ ,” and John presses the open ring of his mouth to the space between Sherlock’s clavicles, pants there, wet, exhaling terror and adrenaline and a tension that feels lethal as it seeps through Sherlock’s skin; a tension Sherlock knows, that’s threatened to take him in his sleep.

Greg clamours down the stairs in that moment, and John and Sherlock both straighten, both still, take in the change of clothes he carries and John smiles, thin and tight but there; doesn’t leave Sherlock’s side and Greg approaches, as Greg puts a hand on Sherlock’s back and guides them, a single unit, toward the bath as he whispers, and it’s almost there, almost embedded in the words that comes, it’s so _close_ :

“Let’s get you warmed up.”

There’s almost love there.

Sherlock prays against the truths of birefringence and quantic forms that it’s not his own biases, not his imagination.

 _Please_.

__________________________________

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that, when he returned, when he risked himself for them again— _again_ , and he was back, and he was almost gone _again_ —it severed something lethal that kept two men, two men who loved him more than light and hope and thought: it severed something crucial that kept their beings firm._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that they both want to reach for him, that they both want to reach for each other and take Sherlock close between them and make him warm again, to take the shadow from beneath his eyes and the sickly cast from his skin and shore up the weak spots in what they have, what they thought was lost and could still be lost and they can’t, they don’t, it—_

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that Greg gets the call, the report that Sherlock can’t be found, that there’s no trace._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that Greg drops his phone and cannot catch his breath; that John, in turn, clasps his chest and wills the tightness to subside enough to walk, to run, to find the part of his heart that’s gone missing once more, to take Greg’s hand and start searching, searching until its _found_ , until the counterpoint tremors in their grips subside._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that as they look for him, as they force their feet to carry their weight and their lungs to take in air when they’re tired, when they’re scared: what Sherlock doesn’t know is that all the while, to their mutual shame, they’re both thinking up escape routes. Thinking of ways to run, to end, to jump, because it hurts too much, and they clawed through it once, if only barely: if only just._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that it’s not a matter of preference, not a question for debate. Greg and John never took their hearts back from their madman, and their hands tremble too harsh to hold one another with any kind of truth._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that it’s killing them, the distance._

_But to lose him again?_

_They will not survive that blow._

__________________________________

They settle him, damp-haired and disoriented, in the centre of the bed—his bed, the one they’ve not slept in, the one he’s not slept in, the one that was _theirs_ , and maybe, _maybe_ it can be again, Sherlock thinks, as his pulse kicks hard, rioting against anguish and heat and the touch of hands, two different sets of hands that he remembers like woodgrain and French silk, the lines and roughs and sacred creases in the flesh, and Sherlock shivers, Sherlock nearly moans: his chest aches as they lay him soft, wide against cool sheets, as they curl around his body, as they seep into his soul and there’s hope in this moment, in these breaths too thick against the dim light, the night air.

There is hope—so foolish; and _yet_.

John’s mouth is on his neck, hands on his pectorals, palms flat to his heaving chest; Greg’s grip is firm, and yet still gentle at his hips, lips pressed to the line of Sherlock’s ribs as he licks across, slow; painstaking against the tide, the heavy pulse of Sherlock’s blood.

If Sherlock moans, trembles, keens asymmetric and unbound as John flattens him straight, spine to John’s sternum, the strength of his chest and the strength of his heart so sheer, so close while John nips forward to kiss at the crease of Sherlock’s lips; if Sherlock shivers and whines, shrill and tight against the tightness in his veins when Greg traces every curve and dip on the way down to Sherlock’s groin where he nestles, nuzzles, inhales deep of Sherlock’s scent and Sherlock tenses, gasps as he feels himself harden, feels his prick lengthen and swell, reaching for the underside of Greg’s chin as the man breathes there, drinks Sherlock’s in as he massages the flanks, the insides of Sherlock’s thighs, the line of his pelvic bone like the holy grail revealed—

If Sherlock hinges epicentral on the cusp of incoherence, he cannot be blamed for it. He cannot be faulted as he tips against infinity, sinks into all the losses scored against his being as they’re filled with molten heat, as they’re licked smooth and kissed into solidity, firm and full and the throb of his heart fills the whole of him, aroused and assured and unbidden.

 _Received_.

John’s palms slide exquisite across the firm globes of Sherlock’s arse, tracing the cleft as he sucks careful, deliberate along the line of Sherlock’s carotid; as Greg drags the tip of his nose across the dorsal of his straining length, breathing soft against the sensitive flesh, the slick swell of his lower lip catching against the shaft and pulling, coaxing a long keen from Sherlock’s throat that John laps up from the outside, that Greg shapes anew as he fits his lips to the tip of Sherlock’s cock, slips his tongue along the wet slit of the glans.

“God, Sherlock,” Greg lets Sherlock slide out from his between his lips, mouths against the skin of Sherlock’s perineum until Sherlock’s muscles tremble, until the pad of John’s finger circles the ring of Sherlock’s arse, the touch less a tease and more a caress as it circles, grips the frayed ends of Sherlock’s already battered nerves and tugs, waits for him to unravel entirely; trusts that together, they’ll reweave him stronger, the weft and warp made of iron and the strings of hearts and oh: his heart’s pounding chaotic and clear as Greg strokes his length and mouths his balls, as John stretches his languid, near-worshipful: as they both keep a hand on Sherlock’s body, still; grounding, to make certain he’s there, and he trusts the touch of them. Trusts that the touch makes it real.

Trusts, as he comes, as they both stroke his skin while he descends, that the shine in their eyes and the heaving of their chests is genuine, means something vibrant and full and will taste like affection and heartache and need on their tongues if he kisses them.

When he kisses them.

And trust—foolish, so foolish, and _yet_ —is what brings his arms around them both as they wrap themselves around his body, as Greg settles against his torso and John props Sherlock tight against his own chest, holding him close: trust is what settles him as both men—his friends, his lovers, the halves of his heart that must come together and remain if he wants to live, wants to breathe—as John inhales, exhales in time with every tenth beat of Sherlock’s heart, and Greg blinks to every eighth, and it would be a lie to say he doesn’t take their heat in every cell and call it proof of life just as surely, just as strongly as he starts to drift, and it’s inevitable, really.

Because Sherlock is a fool, here, in this. With them.

Sherlock will always be a fool. 

He is warm when sleep comes for him, and to every force in the universe, known and unknown, he is grateful.

Unutterably so. 

__________________________________

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that John and Greg watch each other, unblinking, for hours while Sherlock sleeps between them, breathes between them: while Sherlock fills once more the gap that yawned._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that as his breathing evens and his pulse clenches slow, John and Greg note every beat and refuse to break eye contact, every moment they meet—eye with red-rimmed eye—every moment a testament to the fact that this is real, this is _real_ , and they can breathe in deep again because the world’s not breaking._

_What Sherlock doesn’t know is that there’s not a damned thing he can do—mad bastard that he is—to keep either one of the men curled around him from loving him with all that they have; with all that they aspire to be._

_He doesn’t know it—sleeps soundly as John strokes his hair and Greg listens to the gentle thump of his heart; he doesn’t know it, but he will._

_Give it time._


End file.
